Caskets are fundamentally bulky items and are thus expensive to ship. Modularity of casket design enhances shipment by breaking down the otherwise bulky casket into a plurality of easily transportable boxes. However, modularity necessitates assembly that may prove too time-consuming or too complex for many end point users. There is thus a need in the casket market for a modular design that can be quickly and easily assembled and preferably without the use of tools.
Efforts to design modular and/or collapsible caskets date back nearly a century. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 1,349,799 provides a collapsible design and U.S. Pat. No. 1,373,730 provides for separable connected members. A more modern design, see U.S. Pat. No. 3,924,309, divides a casket into its upper, middle and lower bands and allows for relatively quick reassembly. This succeeds at decreasing the weight of any one parcel, but still yields three parcels that are still as long as a casket and thus quite unwieldy. Other efforts succeed at breaking casket members down to smaller sizes, but make assembly too cumbersome. See, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,800,631; 6,269,526; 7,222,400; 7,614,131; and 7,730,595.